The Victorian Water Bill Exposure Draft – Towards the water sensitive city

Last year the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities (CRCWSC) held a seminar on property rights for urban stormwater, which highlighted the opportunity for these rights to be reflected in Victorian law. On 17 March 2014, almost exactly one year later, we hosted a discussion of the Water Bill Exposure Draft, which delivers on many of the recommendations made at the 2013 seminar. Jamie Ewert (CRCWSC Regional Executive Director – Southern Region), was joined by presenters Simon Want (Office of Living Victoria), Dariel DeSousa (Maddocks) and Tara McCallum (Monash University). The key message from this event was that legislative reform is only one of many mechanisms that can influence behaviour change and drive reform.

Simon noted that the proposed Act forms part of a broad reform agenda aimed at revolutionising urban water management in Victoria. The proposed Act will work together with the Metropolitan Planning Strategy and regional and local planning frameworks and water strategies to align future planning and water management at all jurisdictional levels.

Dariel pointed out that while the Water Bill gets Victoria somewhat closer to achieving water sensitive cities, it really aims to streamline the law rather than adding new regulations, and focuses on addressing identified barriers to preferred behaviours. It will be necessary to address some remaining regulatory issues and implement other mechanisms that will drive behavior change, such as a new economic pricing regime for water, in order to achieve transformational reform.

Finally, Tara introduced her work undertaken as part of Project A3.2 Better regulatory frameworks for water sensitive cities. Tara pointed out that a range of frameworks in the urban regulatory space, beyond water regulation alone, impact urban water management – for example, health regulations and building regulations. While the Bill significantly impacts the water resource regulatory space, it doesn’t touch on other related regulatory frameworks, and this will be necessary to remove the remaining regulatory barriers.

To close proceedings, CRCWSC Project A3.2 Leaders Graeme Hodge and Pam O’Connor provided some final thoughts on next steps for legislative and regulatory reform to advance the water sensitive city. It’s clear that significant reform of urban water management has been undertaken by the Victorian Government, and Graeme congratulated them on moving from incremental improvements to focusing on transformational change.